Subject: Re: status of ka (was Re: [lojban] x3 of du'

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 18:38:38 EDT

I think I've lost the thread of all this shouting here, which seems to ahve 
gotten a ong way from fundamentals. 
If we go by the Book (or its clear meaning anyhow) {le ka broda} is the 
referent of {broda}, a function from n-tuples (for what ever n {broda} 
happens to have) to truth values. In that sense, all of its places are 
{ce'u}, corresponding to its canonical form
Lx1...Lxn Bx1...xn (read the L as "lambda"). Calling it a property is 
possibly misleading, if you think of a property as a 1-place function. So, 
call it a relation then or a relationship. Or call it a property of n-tuples
If you fill m places with sumti, you get a new function of n-m places 
(related to the old one in a systematic way). If you fill all the places, 
you get a proposition (a direct reference to a truth value, also related to 
the function in a systematic way). 
It seems that we seldom want to talk about the function flat out, but about 
certain aspects of it, the roles represented by one place or another or some 
combination of places. So the issue seems to be, how to do this most 
efficiently, allowing that the uninteresting places are filled with {zo'e} 
not {ce'u} and that we want to write as few of these cases as possible. 
Proposal 2C does that on the assumption that the places more likely to be 
interesting are the lefter places (the theory behind place structure after 
all). I am seeing a counting idea, that explicit {ce'u} be used for {ce'u} 
and that the empty places be {zo'e} (I think, but it is hard to say, exactly, 
since all the cases so far have had only a single {ce'u}).
What exactly, please, is the problem and what is the argument about beyond 
this?